Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

Pretend On Property didn’t exist and I was starting from scratch. Would I enter the property space again or sell similar products? The answer is surprising.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included with me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. Now, I am driving at the moment, heading from the Gold Coast to the Sunshine Coast, which is about a 2-hour drive.

I’m going up there to meet with and to spend some time with Ben Everingham who’s my buyer’s agent of choice that I am very closely partnered with. So we’re going to be hanging out, setting up some systems together, doing some videos for the On Property website and stuff like that. So it’s going to be a good day.

I’ve got a drive ahead of me and so I thought I would take the time to record an episode for you guys because it has been a while since I’ve given an update on what’s happening with my business and how I’m moving things forward.

First, let’s talk about On Property. So I’ve been asking myself the question, “If I was starting from scratch, would I start a property website again?” and I’ve also been asking myself the questions, “If I was a brand new start-up and I was deciding to get into the property space, what would I do to be able to generate X amount of income per year?” and I changed the figure based on how I’m feeling or the answer that I want to get.

So I say, if I am starting a brand new start-up today, pretend that On Property doesn’t exist and I want to earn $100,000 a year from this business – that’s the goal of the start-up. What would I do to generate that? Would I go down the path of property tools in which I’m selling low-cost software for property investors? Would I go down the path of selling educational courses? Would I go down the path of being a lead generation tool for people like Ben the buyer’s agent and potentially other people as well? Or would I go down the path of selling my own courses and things like that? I mean, would I go down the path of my membership site where I am showing people properties and things like that?

They’re like the 4 kind of options that I have because it’s what I’ve done. It’s the space that I know. And also, when I look at the property field, I can’t think of anything else that I would want to do because there’s a lot money to be made as a buyer’s agent or there’s a lot of money to be made marketing new build properties because they have huge commissions for them. But in terms of marketing properties, they’re generally overpriced – the new build properties. In terms of being a buyer’s agent, that’s a lot of work that I don’t want to do.

I love creating content. I want to be an education company, not a one-on-one sort of consultancy-type model. So they’re kind of out of the question and so, it just leaves me with kind of the strategies that I’m already using. And so, I just kind of think, “Okay, well, starting from scratch, what would I do?” So, property tools would be out of the question because I looked at the data, it started about a year ago, it’s probably made me about somewhere between $6,000-$10,000 in the space of a year.

Now, that’s not too bad as a little side income, which is what property tools is. But if I was starting a start-up, would I go after that cash flow calculator sort of market? No, I wouldn’t because it’s not going to generate me enough money. I can’t market and scale that at all.

Then, I look at the courses that I created. Okay, I started creating courses about a year ago as well and they’ve made even less money. They sell for about $100 a piece and they’ve made about $3,000 or $3,000-$4,000, something like that. So they’re not really a viable option either because they just don’t sell in enough volume and I have decent volume on my website. We’re talking over 100,000 people a month come to visit my website, which is quite high for an Australian property blog.

You have to remember, Australia only has about a bit over 20 million people, compared to America which has over 300 million people. So you’re talking about a much smaller market. In terms of courses, not something I’d pursue because you really do need to sell the high value courses. You’re talking $2,500 to $6,000 courses in order to make significant money in this industry.

So that leaves me with that lead generation and it leaves me with m membership where I am finding and sharing with people positive cash flow properties. And so, I looked at the revenue for both of those and from Ben, the revenue was roughly around $40,000 in the last 12 months and from my membership site, the revenue was roughly around I think it was $60,000 to maybe $80,000.

I didn’t do hard figures in the last 2 years, so kind of about $40,000 per year each. Though, I know those figures are wrong because I didn’t make $80,000 in the last financial year. So, I don’t know what’s messed up there or what calculations I’m doing wrong, but the takeaway from it is that they’re basically even.

And I was also thinking, well, they kind of serve 2 separate audiences. So my audience in terms of On Property or the product that I sell – the membership site, is really for DIY investors. People who want to go out there, find the properties, research the areas. They want to learn how to do it themselves. And my membership site is great for that. I show them properties, but I don’t help them negotiate, I don’t make decisions for them.

I provide them with the courses that they need to learn how to do different things. I provide them with the cash flow tool as well, so they can go ahead and use that to analyze properties and things like that. So I kind of give them a kit that they need to become a DIY investor in terms of positive cash flow property. But then, Ben’s offering is very different because these are people who don’t want to be DIY. These are people who want someone to hold their hand.

They want someone to lead them, someone to help them. And so, that’s a different market segment, I guess you would say, a different type of customer. And so, it kind of works perfectly that those 2 would be aligned with each other – that I’ve got this audience of general property investors. A portion of them will want to be DIY, which will be my membership site. A portion of them will want the helping hand, which will be recommending people to Ben.

So I guess the answer that I came to when I thought about if I was to start from scratch, what strategy would I take? And it would probably the dual fold strategy in terms of marketing my membership site as well as marketing Ben’s service for people who don’t want to be DIY. So that made me think, “Okay, let’s try and re-vamp On Property.

Let’s try and again bring it back to this membership site concept.” and I was thinking, originally, “Okay, people just want the properties. Maybe I should strip the membership site away and just sell people the properties again.” which is a path that I’ve taken in the past and it kind of works.

I don’t really know, I haven’t tested it enough, but people are happy to sign up just for the properties. But then, I was talking with my wife, Kelly, about it and talking about the different products that I have, talking through all of this. And she made me realize that the properties themselves aren’t just what people need. So people want the properties, yes, that’s probably what most people are paying for. But then, people also want the calculator so that they can calculate those properties or so that they can calculate their own properties.

They also want the courses so that they can learn how to be a better and more confident investor. So, rather than seeing my membership site as all these different things, like you’ve got property listings, you’ve got tools, you’ve got courses, I see my membership site now as one complete package that helps people invest in positive cash flow properties if they want to do it themselves.

Every little bit forms an entire solution to help people find positive cash flow properties and if I only shared the properties with them and I didn’t provide the tools, then I wouldn’t be providing that complete package for people and they wouldn’t be getting everything they need in order to succeed. So it made me realize that, okay, probably not best to break it all up, but probably best to leave it as a membership website.

We also talked about subscription versus on-off payments. We were talking about the comparison between Netflix, you’re paying, in Australia, it’s like $8-$12 a month for Netflix. You’re like, “Yeah, I’m happy to pay that subscription.” Easy to sign up for that because it’s so cheap. You hardly even notice it and you can cancel any time. So when you’re making that decision, it’s not a big decision that you have to make. However, when you’re signing up for something like On Property membership and you’re talking about $300 per year, the thought that goes through people’s minds is very different to that. So they’re thinking, “This is quite a large commitment that I’m making, $300.

I need to think about whether I can afford this now as well as whether I can afford this in 12 months’ time.” So the question is, would it be better to sell it as $300 per year and just get less people, but get them as subscribers or would it be better to sell it as a one-off payment of $300 and then, they just get 12 months access. And at the end of 12 months, they’re not re-charged, but they’ll obviously have an opportunity to sign up again if they want to. And after some discussion, I’ve decided to at least test the fact that it’s just $300, it’s a one-time payment.

And I put myself in the mindset when I’m making business decisions and things like that, if I’m signing up for a subscription that’s a yearly thing, I need to think about that. I need to think about, “Will I be using this product in a year’s time?” I remember there was a product, Countdown Monkey, that was $79 per year. And when I signed up for that, I had to think, “Okay, will I be using this in 1 year’s time or not?” And then, you’ve got to schedule in time to cancel it if you want, so it is a much bigger decision.

Whereas, when there’s software that I purchased, like once I purchased the SEO Yoast Plugin for videos, right, and I think that was the same price. Like $79 or something like that and it came with 12 months of free updates and support. Then, after 12 months, you don’t get any more updates. So it’s in equivalent the same sort of thing that I’m going through and I was like, “Yup, okay. I can purchase that.

I know it’s going to be good for 12 months.” And then, the service didn’t actually end up working for me. It didn’t end up being what I needed. And so, when 12 months came around, I didn’t renew. But the decision to sign up with Yoast versus the decision to sign up with Countdown Monkey was so much easier because you’re just doing a one-off payment, there’s no commitment. And so, I’m hoping that by changing On Property from an annual subscription or a monthly subscription to a one-off payment with 12 months access, that I will gain more members.

I also wanted to change On Property from being a blog that also sell products into a product that also has a blog. So, the membership site is going to be more heavily featured. I’ve created a new sales page which will go on the homepage. And then, the blog will be kind of separate link that people need to click on.

Most people come to the individual pages through the blog, anyway, and return customers are there, but they’re not huge. And so, basically, I wanted people to think On Property – that means positive cash flow properties. So if I want to find positive cash flow properties, I go to On Property. Not, I go to On Property and it’s this property blog/video/podcast and, “Oh, look, they have products as well. Maybe I’ll check them out.”

I want it to be like, okay, this is what On Property is. All the marketing that we do is to support this and that’s to support the membership site. And then, obviously, there’s going to be huge marketing opportunities for recommending Ben through the email list, through the podcast, through the videos, through a whole different variety of sources that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t distract away from the offering that I’m bringing because there’s so many people who aren’t interested in my offering that may be interested in getting the one-on-one help.

That’s kind of my new strategy for On Property moving forward. If I had the question in mind; Okay, if I wanted to start On Property today or start a property website today with the goal of making $100,000 per year in revenue… Then, it seems feasible now that my membership site could generate half of that. My referrals to Ben could generate the other half of that. And so, combined, they would make $100,000 together. Whereas, individually, I don’t think I could make $100,000 from either of those things. So, that’s cool. I feel like I’ve kind of got clarity on On Property again.

I’ve got some work to do to bring that to the point that I want it, but I’m very excited. And so, a takeaway for you guys with this is to really get rid of the idea of what you have now. So I’ve already built this thing, I’ve already got this traffic. For me, I’ve already got On Property that’s generating. Over 100,000 people a month are coming to that website.

That’s a pretty valuable asset, but if you just strip that all away and say, “Okay, if I was to start today, would I build the same thing or what would I build if I was to start today?” And so, I think doing the same activity for your business could be helpful for you because you can say, okay, get rid of that ‘sunk cost bias’ they call it because I’ve already sunk so much time or so much money into this, I need to keep going with it. Get rid of that and imagine yourself starting from scratch again. Starting brand new from scratch, what would I do?

That’s really helped to get me clarity and hopefully, it helps you give you clarity as well. In terms of other side projects, I was thinking of building on publicspeakingpower.com. I’ve kind of decided against that just because it’s not generating enough revenue and I don’t think it will. My niche website is doing pretty well. I think it made about $100 last month.

It’s probably on-target to make somewhere between $100 and $200 this month. So in terms of that niche website, that’s doing well. And there’s some other niche websites that I want to start as well. So rather than focusing on trying to grow Public Speaking Power into some big website, which is never going to make a lot of money, I’ll just leave it there. It makes like $50 a  month and it pays for itself, so I’ll just leave it there doing its thing and I’ll focus on On Property and I’ll focus on other niche websites that I’m starting as well.

My wife keeps encouraging me to start a review site to review all the things that I love to talk about. Things like microphones and phones and whatever it is I’m buying at the time, you know, tripods, adapters, all these sorts of things. Just a random website where I can talk about different marketing things, different software that’s just product reviews and so, I think I’m going to do that. I kind of did with pelt.co and I kind of do it with pelt.co, but Pelt is, I’ve realized, such a dumb name and it’s taken me so long to realize that.

I always knew Pelt was a dumb name, but I thought if I could make something big enough and exciting enough, then it would take on a life of its own. Just like Google has, but I think, really, at the end of the day, Pelt’s just a dumb name and I probably should’ve never created a website with that name. Oh, well, but anyway, so I’m think of starting a website. Something like Ryan’s reviews or reviewed by Ryan or something like that. There is a Youtube channel called Lachlan Likes A Thing, where this guy does really great reviews on headphones.

I’m not sure if that’s still running, but that sort of concept – that it’s just me, I like this thing. You’re coming because it’s my reviews. It’s not something that I’m going to scale into this big business like The Sweehome or The Wirecutter or something like that. It’s just me reviewing products in my own way. That’s something that’s on the cards, but I haven’t started at the moment.

That’s it for me today, guys. I think I have babbled enough and talked enough. I’ve talked about On Property and what I’m doing with that. I talked about also focusing on niche websites and really just leaving Public Speaking Power there. And I’ve also talked about creating a review site as well. And so, that’s where I’m at in my business. I’m still on the drive. I’ve just got less than 2 hours to go now because I’ve been talking to you guys for about 15 minutes. It’s going to be a good day on the Sunshine Coast.

It’s pretty sunny weather. Nice and warm up here for winter in Australia. It’s going to be a good day that I think we can create some good content with Ben and I think we’re going to strengthen our partnership and hopefully generate a lot of business as a result of this time that we’re spending together.

Hopefully, we’ll get either some coffee or some beer or both because I love coffee and I love beer. So, maybe coffee in the morning when I get there and maybe beer before I go in the arvo. Not too many because I still want to be able to drive. No drink driving, that is a terrible thing. I would never do that. So, yeah. So that’s where I’m at today. I wish you the best of luck in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

With my business performing well at the moment my mind is freed up to think about what I should be doing now to set myself up to have the life I want in 3-5 years time.

Hey and welcome to Instructions not Included. This series is about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online.

In this episode, I want to talk about actually planning for where you’re going to be in 3, 4 maybe 5 years’ time because that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment.

I’m trying to put in the work and trying to put in the plan, the system in place so that in 3 years’ time, I can do what I want to do.

Generally, for me, it’s really hard to plan forward more than 12 months because when you’re running your own business, when you’ve got 3 children under the age of 7, things change pretty quickly.

Me and my wife, our friends call us gypsies because we move so much. We’ve relocated to different cities 3 times. We’ve moved house 14 times in the last 7 years.

So planning ahead can be really difficult for us when it’s more than 12 months into the future. Generally, we only live in a house for 12 months, if we’re lucky.

But what I have been thinking is like, we have started homeschooling our daughter who is 6, she’s in Grade 1. We enjoy it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing that. Thinking of starting a website on homeschooling where I’ll discuss those, but I won’t waste your time here. But basically, in my mind, anyway, I’ll talk about it in a different episode if people are interested. So, we’re homeschooling our daughter. Our son, who is 4 is in what’s called pre-prep.

Here, where he does 3 days a week and then they start prep or like, kindergarten next year. And so, we’re talking about, is he going to go to kindergarten? Is he going to do homeschool? What do we think we’re going to do? He’s happy at school, but then, he wants to do homeschool because his sister does homeschool. I don’t know.

We don’t really know what’s going to happen. But then, fast forward 3 years, and our youngest who is currently 1 to 1.5, he will be 4 to 4.5 and we will be making these decisions again for him.

So fast forward 3 to 4 years, there is the possibility that we could be homeschooling 3 children if that’s the route we decide to take. Now, we haven’t decided to take that route yet so we’re not sure. But we kind of need to prepare for that and I am currently doing the majority of the homeschooling.

The responsibility is on me. So I spending the mornings doing school with my daughter and then come to work. If we were to add one more child to homeschool, I can foresee it being a lot more difficult than it is. I may need to drop my work hours. You know, things may change.

Basically I’m at the point in my business now where the business is quite successful. onproperty.com.au is quite successful. It makes decent revenue in terms of my own products. Then, there’s revenue on top of that in terms of recommending a buyer’s agent. It’s one of the biggest property blogs in the country.

It’s got a big presence in terms of podcasting and in terms of YouTube that is just continually growing, which I think will be the future. Anyway, that’s ticking along and doing well. But given the Australian property market, it may continue to do well for another 10 years or it may not be a stable source of income in the future. We’re just not 100% sure about that.

So I’m trying to think now while I’ve got stability of income, spending a couple of days a week doing On Property. That frees me up, I’ve got a couple of days a week to do some other things. It frees me up to think, “Okay, 3 years or 4 days down the track, let’s just imagine that I am stepping back from work a bit.

I am doing more homeschool. Hopefully, we’re travelling as a family – that’s something I would really love to do. What do I want my life to look like? What do I want my income to be coming from?” all that sort of stuff.

They’re the kind of questions that I’m asking myself now. Because I don’t have to ask, “Where is the next paycheck is coming from? How are we going to survive the next month? What do I need to do to make that happen?” I can begin to ask, “Okay, in 3 years’ time, what sort of revenue streams do I want to have in my business? What sort of flexibility do I want to have?”

The ultimate thing for me is to generate as much semi-passive income as possible. I do make money from a bunch of different sites. On Property makes the lion’s share – 90%+ of my income. But I do get advertising income, I do have affiliate income from other sites like my public speaking site, podcasting site.

I’ve got a site about online marketing. I’ve got a site about Super Smash Brothers Melee. I’ve got this personal podcast as well, which doesn’t really make any money at the moment. And then I’ve got a software tool that is associated with On Property as well.

I’ve got another niche site. I’m thinking starting another one. And so, I’ve got a few sources of income and they all kind of add up a little bit. But the great thing is, like with the public speaking site, I haven’t touched that in probably 3 years now – 2 to 3 years. That’s something I want to start re-investing in. But that still makes money today, which is just absolutely amazing.

I’m just going to go ahead and check my Google AdSense in terms of YouTube as well as in terms of the website – in terms of how much money that website is making. Because that’s something I want to scale up. I want to create a lot more content for that. And so, let’s go ahead and have a look. I have not used this site in quite a long time. There it is. I’m actually going to change the brand name back to Public Speaking Power.

I decided to change it to outspoken.co, but they never did anything with it. So I think I’m going to change it back to Public Speaking Power. Wow! I have 711 subscribers and I’ve got 36 videos on there. So, not too many videos. I just got to login to a whole bunch of different stuff so bear with me for a minute. Let’s go ahead and sign in.

So in terms of revenue from YouTube, we’re looking at $10 a month. Not much, but that pays for 2-3 coffees a months. Actually, I pay about $3 per coffee, so a coffee a week it pays for. And then let’s go ahead and look at the performance reports for the website. Common reports, websites. Okay. Not last 7 days, let’s go last month. We’ll look at that. In terms of that revenue, we’re looking at above $60. So we’re looking all up about $50-$100 a month.

I’d love to take that up to $100-$200 a month. And then, as well, work on other stuff and build them up. Even if I had 10 different things making $100 a month, but that is super passive. That’s just a baseline income that could pay my bills if we needed to travel. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I’m trying to think about in terms of the next 3 years. How can I build up these things? Change this from $50-$100 a month to $100-$200 and then do that multiple times and do that for a couple of different sites. Last month, let’s do this month. So this month’s tracking very similar, but I do have a niche site that is now generating probably $10 a month. So, yeah, I’m building up that sort of stuff.

So it’s kind of going back to what I was doing years ago in terms of content creation and niche sites and stuff like that and I come back to this. But I guess, I just want to take the things that have been working, build them up. And then opportunities kind of come out of that.

So with On Property, for a long time, it was just advertising. Then, I had my own products. Then, this agreement with Ben came up and I’m making more money now through that agreement than I’ve probably made through advertising in the history of the website. As you grow bigger, as you become more noticeable, as you build up in the community, these opportunities come out of it. And so, I’m hoping that as I build up these other sites, opportunities will come out of those as well.

At the moment, I am focusing on maintaining On Property, keeping that source of income. But as well, building up my passive income and doing work now that’s probably not going to pay off any time soon. But they will hopefully pay off in 3 years. And so we can look back on this in episode 500 in 3 or 5 years’ time of Instructions not Included.

I’ll be travelling and I’ll have these passive income sites on the side and I’ll be doing what I really enjoy, which is creating content.

Hopefully, this will work. I wish you the best in your business. I hope that you’re not just thinking about today, but you’re thinking about 3 to 5 years down the track as well. That is it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

This week I have found myself a unique angle to grow Melee.co as well as a potential profit stream.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included, the podcast about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online. In terms of my online business On Property which is my main source of revenue, it has been going really well.

My partnership with Ben who’s the buyer’s agent and referring people on to them is generating enough profit for me to get by. It is also building up what I like to call a buffer fund. The way I look at my business account is not how much money I have in there but how many weeks of runway that I have.

I know that my own products basically pay for all of my online expenses plus I’ll probably get a little bit of profit from that. So anything in my bank account is basically runway. It’s basically savings that I’m using to live off so I draw a certain portion of money each week.

Back in December you may remember I actually ran out of money and I didn’t have enough to pay myself what I would normally pay myself each week and so I was slightly behind. Luckily I scraped through and was able to get enough money that I didn’t have to draw from savings. But I’ve slowly been growing up a buffer fund and I’ve now got a buffer fund of about 12 weeks so that is about three months.

In Australia it is kind of coming up to tax time in a couple of months. The end of June is the end of our financial year and so a portion of that will need to go towards tax which means I don’t really have three months buffer fund but at least I have enough money to pay my tax bill which is obviously very important.

I have started a new website because that’s what I do called melee.co. This is a domain name I actually bought exactly a year ago. Well, it’s not exactly a year ago but a year ago this month. I bought it because I was getting into Melee. I found it interesting and I thought maybe I’ll do something in this space in the future if I do become passionate about this game like I thought I would. And lo and behold I have become very passionate about this game and I’ve actually found an avenue to build up this website into something that could potentially be substantial enough to generate some profit and to generate some income for me. I’ve done 15 episodes or something like that.

I started back in March and I was just documenting my journey as a Melee player. If you don’t know what I’m talking about – Super Smash Brothers Melee – it’s a fighting game on GameCube that is quite competitive. So basically the biggest tournament got about two hundred thousand people watching the grand finals. I play this game competitively so I started a website about it called melee.co.

Little over a month ago I started documenting my journey as a player but I did know that this wasn’t going to get many people interested in it. This was more just for me to fulfil my desire to create content about something that I love. Therefore I created this and it basically had no views. I can go ahead and check on YouTube for you if you want to know. I’ve had just over 10 views like the last month. Therefore it is not very many views at all on this channel. And look, I expected that.

I thought this would be something that would be great to document and to look back on over the years. And often I find that when I start in a niche and I am not a hundred percent sure what to do I just start with something and see what happens. So I started this YouTube channel. The stuff was going on the website but I didn’t have the website set up properly. I didn’t have my theme set up. I didn’t have it looking nice or anything like that.

But then the other day not that long ago, it was on Friday the 22nd of April – so a little over a week ago I decided that I’m going to take the next steps (something I’ve been thinking about for a short period of time) and actually start to interview pro players.

This is something that I feel there’s a hole in the market as there are a lot of people out there talking about the top 10 players in the world but there’s basically nobody talking about the top 100 players. And so I thought a good approach for me would be to approach those top 100 players, get interviews with them, interview them, share that and then obviously get those players to share with their audience as well. These are players that are just I guess undeserved in terms of people creating content about them and they have some interesting things to add and benefits to add to the community.

I had this idea a few weeks ago but didn’t really do much with it. I got my virtual assistant who is absolutely awesome – I got her to generate me a list of the top 100 players, their names, what character they play, their Twitter accounts, etc, which was quite easy to get from the website that does the top 100 rankings. So she pulled that.

On Friday I just decided that what I was going to do was to just tweet at some pro players and see if they would be interested in interviewing me. Rather than going from the first player working my way down to the second best, the best, etc, I actually kind of went backwards starting at a hundred, working my way up the list towards number one.

There was one person that I was trying to get on the show that kind of inspired me to start this and kind of inspired the idea of interviewing pro players. I thought I would get him on first as an honour to him so I contacted him through a whole bunch of different methods and he just never responded. So I thought I was going to reach out to these pro players. The chance that they would respond was probably going to be pretty slim to none. So I would contact maybe like a bunch of them and see what the feedback was.

I contacted 13 players thinking maybe one or two would respond to me and lo and behold I had a massive response. And think about this – I was tweeting at these people so I had 140 characters to work with. Not a lot and even less when you take into fact that I had to be at them on Twitter – 130 characters or something like that.

So far I’ve already done two interviews. I’ve got five more lined up. All of the 13 people that I got in contact with I was able to organize seven interviews so that’s more than 50%. I thought I’d get one or two but I got seven and so I’m kind of overwhelmed with how many interviews I need to do. There are quite a lot but it’s good to say this is the response I’m sort of getting and in future I’ll probably contact less people at a time just because the response has been so good and it has been hard to schedule things given the time zone differences between me and these pro players who live in America.

Therefore my avenue is that I’m going to interview pro players. I’ve already done two. Basically we talk about their back story, what got them into the game, how do they practice, how do they get better, what they see for the future and just having a conversation with them about the game. I’ll be contacting them, interviewing them and then I’ll be sharing that through YouTube, the podcast and also on the website. I might even publish it to Twitter.

I’m not actually sure if you can do that or not but everyone who plays this game really connect with each other on Twitter. So that’s something that I need to consider as well. And then hopefully we’ll get the flow-on effect of these players who have been interviewed. As they’ve been featured they would want to share it with their audience and as a result we’ll get some flow-on from that. We’ll see how it goes. This is the avenue that I’m going down to grow my audience.

Also, in terms of profiting from this because this is unique content and because I’m not using copyrighted material, etc, I can make money through YouTube advertising. Therefore this isn’t going to be something that makes me $100,000 per year. However, this is something that I enjoy doing, something that I’m passionate about and the great thing about YouTube is that it’s fairly passive income once it is set up and once we got the episodes there it kind of generates income.

And while I’ve got income coming in from On Property, generating external income, generating more passive income, separating my income just from one side and generating multiple streams of income is a big goal of mine. So if I can do it in this niche that I’m passionate about even if it becomes like $100 a month or something like that I don’t need it to be thousands of dollars but it’s an extra source of revenue for me and it’s something that I’m passionate about.

It may change in the future and I may have product ideas or things like that. I’m not a hundred percent sure but I’m excited about this. I’m having a lot of fun interviewing these players. I’m having a lot of fun creating this new revenue stream.

The niche website that I started has started picking up and getting decent traffic. That’s something I need to work out – how I am going to focus on this niche website as well. I kind of need to get my head around how am I going to run so many different websites because at the moment all my focus is on running On Property or running melee.co but I want to be able to improve all of my websites. I therefore kind of need to get a process down where that becomes easy and I haven’t really worked that out yet. That is something that I’m working towards.

Also, another thing that I wanted to say was I’m doing kind of like an experiment with melee.co.  In a lot of cases a lot of websites, a lot of businesses they try to interview the best people in a space because once you get the best person or the most well-known person it becomes easier to get everyone else.

In the property space, now that I’ve interviewed Steve McKnight it’s easier to get other people. In the Melee space if I interview top players like Armada, Hungrybox, Mango etc, it would then lend their credibility to me to get other players. But I’m interested to see if I do it the other way around – if I interview lower-end players, first of the top 100 if that will I guess encouraged top players to be interviewed by me because I have already interviewed all these other players who aren’t as good as you or aren’t as ranked highly as you maybe I should interview you as well. I wonder how that will go.

I’ll see how it goes because this is an experiment for me but it could be a good approach. At least in this particular space in order to work my way up to the better players and to get them to say yes. I would say, “Look I’ve interviewed all of these people who are lower than you on the rankings but I haven’t interview you yet so maybe I should interview you.”  Again, it’s an experiment. We’ll see what happens.

That’s it from me today guys. That’s what I’ve been working on this week. I hope that you’re having a great week working on your business. Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

Since I realised my current business strategy wasn’t working I have created a new strategy that I will be testing.

Hey Guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I wanted to give you an update on my strategy of my business moving forward.

I last recorded and episode a little over a week ago how I made the realization that my business wasn’t actually viable the way I was approaching it and I needed to make some major changes to my business and to my business model. And so, I wanted to give you guys a bit of an update on where I’m at with that and some of the plans I have moving forward. So, if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, go back and listen to that so you can see the realization that I had.

But basically, the way that I was looking at it, I thought I was running a sticky membership site where people would recur over and over again, but what I’ve discovered was that 90% of people were leaving within the first year.

So basically, ever single year, I’m starting from scratch with new members.

So what has that affected? Well, it’s affected the way that I sell On Property Plus. I now think of it more as a single one-time product than I do as a recurring membership subscription. So I’ve gone back to selling it through an evergreen sales funnel. So people come into the funnel, they get some free videos and then the door’s open for them for a limited time – for 5 days.

They get special links for that and they get 5 days to act and to purchase. Otherwise, it then closes for them and they can’t access it anymore. So it adds scarcity to the situation to help get people over the line and it’s actually real scarcity because they only get that only opportunity for that set period of time and if they don’t take action, then they can’t actually sign up after that. I’m also considering doing a couple of major launches throughout the year, but I haven’t taken any action on that.

A bit of an update there. My first cohort is going through this week of I think it was around 60 people or something like that. It opened the doors yesterday. I’ve already had one sale of $300. So that is a positive outlook for me seeing as I can already see that it’s working. I haven’t had annual sale in like 2 months. So to get an annual sale on the first day that doors opened was very exciting and I think it’s next week from the tracking that I looked at, we’ve got over 300 people going through the launch sequence next week.

These people aren’t as targeted, so we’re really going to have to track that and see how things go, but it’s going to be really interesting to see if this is going to be viable. If I can achieve my goals through this. So that’s set up – that’s really good.

I’ve also gone deep into the tracking. And so, what I’m going to be doing is tracking what freebie people signed up for. And then, I can track based on what people signed up for, how likely are they to convert into a sale. So I can estimate; okay, someone who signs up for the new build checklist, they’re, on average, worth $1 per user. Someone who signs up for the free properties checklist, on average, they’re worth $6 a user. So then I can focus on creating free content that attracts the right people. So that’s the idea behind it. So I’ve got about 5 or 6 things that I’m tracking there.

I still got a bit of work to do to setup the tracking in full for that, but I’ve got a little bit of it going, which is good.

What else are we at? Okay, Property Tools is just ticking away. No changes there at the moment. I don’t have any plans for that, but basically, On Property is going on autopilot. I did get another commission from Ben. But, yeah, On Property, in terms of content, in terms of marketing, it’s going basically on autopilot.

I’m going to collect some of that data and based on what the data tells me, that will drive what sort of content I create in the future because I want to create the right content that attracts people who are likely to buy from my product. So I’ll scale that up slowly through content marketing, but I just want to focus on the right content for me and for the product that I’m selling. And then, hopefully, I can just fund that with On Property Plus as well as commissions from Ben.

So that’s On Property out of the way. That was the big thing that we had to deal with last week was that it wasn’t viable and now we’re in a situation where we believe it’s going to be viable moving forward. It’s not going to be a homerun success. It’s not going to be the future of my business, but hey, it can tick along in the background. It can generate enough revenue to keep us going and for me to pursue other things.

Now, let’s talk about what I am doing and the plans that I have moving forward. When I started working for myself full time, when I quit my 6-figure income job to work for myself full time, I had big dreams about what I wanted to do with my business and the kind of thing that I wanted to create. When I was talking to my wife about our whole situation, she said to me, “Go back to the place where you last felt like God was saying to you, ‘Yes, this is what you’re meant to do.’ where you last felt like you were on track to create what you wanted to create.” Going back, the last thing where I was absolutely like, “Yes.

I’m really passionate about this.” was when I was thinking about creating an education company for adults, basically. What I want to do is help teach people basically any form of education that’s going to help them improve their lives in some way. I want to be a part of that. I always wanted to create really practical education things that they can use to apply to improve their lives.

So going back, that’s kind of the last time I was really happy – the last time I was really passionate. And so I went back to that and I thought, “Okay, let’s just say On Property ticks away and we’re going to survive. I’m not going to have to go back to work for myself, how do I want to move forward with my business?” The problem with On Property, you know On Property was great. Creating your own products is a great way to make money, but there’s a lot of maintenance in creating your own products.

There’s a lot of effort that goes into creating your own products, which takes away from creating free content to market those products. And then, once you launch them and sell them, obviously, there’s ongoing support and maintenance for that. And so, I was thinking, if I want to build a large, scalable company, I need to think about things other than my own products. There’s definitely going to be some situations where I will create my own products, but if I want to go broad, I need to think of a business strategy that is going to work better.

Something that was really cool was I created this mini course on how to start a podcast fast. So I talk through it, it was really practical, step-by-step guide on how to create a podcast. And I just created that, I put it on Youtube.

I put it on my website, podcastfast.com and basically set it up. And I had big plans for the site to launch my own products, but I never got around to it. But anyway, that course has been viewed thousands and thousands of times by people and it’s made me over $1000 Australian in referrals to a web host which I recommend, Arvix. Basically, people go through the tutorial. Part of the tutorial is here’s how you setup a website for your podcast and here’s a host that I recommend, it’s Arvix, and I got a coupon code.

A special coupon code that gets them 20% off, but then also that’s an affiliate link, an affiliate code and so it’s get tracked to me and I make money every time someone signs up. So over the course of how ever long it’s been since I launched that – I would have to go back into the Instructions not Included archives to work out when I launched that, but it’s made about $1,000 for me.

I feel really great about it because I was able to put out free content, really help people and then, obviously, there’s the financial reward of the $1,000 that I’ve received. And so, I thought, “Okay, well, this is a business model that I’ve kind of micro tested and kind of proven to work. Maybe I can take this idea and I can take it to other things that I know how to do.” And again, my wife was really encouraging me to go down this route.

She’s been talking about it for months. For me to create videos, to create podcast, to create lessons on the things that I know how to do. Things like how to create a website and stuff like that. But I never wanted to be in the make-money-online niche. I have been in that in the past when I wasn’t making any money online. I don’t want to be one of those make-money-online gurus and have the majority of my income come from me telling people how to make money. I was really put off by that for a long time.

But then I thought about this podcastfast series that I did and I thought, “You know what I could do, I could create series that showed people practically how to do some of the things that I do.” So rather than saying to people, “Here’s how to make money online.” I can say to people, “Okay, you want to make money online in X way, here’s how to go about setting that up.” The same approach I’ve taken for On Property.

I don’t own any property so I can’t say to people, “Here’s the best way to invest. Look at me, I’ve invested, I’m so successful.” I say, “Okay, you want to invest in positive cash flow property, here’s how to find them. I’ll teach you how to find them or provide services for you on how to find them.” So I’m telling them they should invest this way. I’m not saying I’m successful. I’m just saying I know how to find positive cash flow properties and so, here, I’m going to help you.

I like to relate it to the gold rush. I am someone who’s selling pans to the people who are coming to the gold rush. So I’m not selling a course on how to become rich through the gold rush. But what I’m doing is I’ve got a shop where I’m just providing people with pans or with Levi jeans that they can buy that’s going to help them when they’re out there panning for gold. So rather than saying, “Here’s how you should pan for gold.” People are like, “I’m coming here to pan for gold.” and I’m like, “Well, here’s a pan.” or “Here’s some jeans to keep you warm while you’re panning for gold.”

The first course that I’m going to be creating is how to create a membership site with zero coding. So how can you setup a membership site and sell your membership site without touching a line of code at all? And so, this will be a mini-series.

It ended up being broken into 12 parts and it’ll walk people through exactly how to setup a membership site that they can go ahead and sell. Start from the very beginning, about buying a domain name, getting a hosting, all of that sort of stuff. And I have a couple of affiliate products in there that I’m recommending – domain name, hosting and LeadPages as well and WishList member. So I think I’ve got 4 affiliate products that I recommend as part of how to create this membership site with zero coding.

The goal is this is the same as podcastfast – to put it out, to create this awesome, epic mini-series that just walks people through exactly how to do it and then the goal is to create affiliate income through that, through the products and services that I recommend.

I also have plans for how to create an evergreen launch sequence. Maybe some stuff on email marketing. Maybe that’s all I’ve got – the membership site and the evergreen launch sequence are kind of the two that I’m mulling over at the moment. I’ll do the membership site one. Move on to the evergreen one and then, hopefully I’ve come up with another idea for something I can create after that. So that’s what I’m up to. That’s my strategy at the moment. Get On Property ticking away and then use my time to create these educational videos that I’m giving away for free. And then, the business model is that there’ll be some affiliate income through that.

That’s where I’m at at the moment. That’s where my business is at. All of these lessons will be hosted on my website, Pelt. So I’ve got pelt.co and so that’s a brand name that I’m going with. Originally, I wanted to make it stand for something like, “Personal Education Life Transformation” or “Personal Education Learning and Tools” or “Learning and Training” or something like that. But in the end, I’ve gone with Pelt – Learn Faster. That’s my tagline at the moment. I don’t think it’s awesome, but I think it’s good enough for now.

So all of these tutorials, you guys can find. Just go to pelt.co and you’ll be able to find them all over there. Yeah, I’m really excited for this. I’m really excited to create these really helpful mini-series for people. I think it’s going to help a lot of people and I think it’s also a potential for me to create the passive income that I want to have the live that I want in 3-5 years where I can travel with my family and have the freedom and flexibility to do a whole variety of things. Some of these stuff that I recommend will be one-time payments and I’ll get a fee, like with hosting. But then, some of it is recurring as well, so the email marketing stuff I’ll recommend will be recurring.

I’ll also recommend Snappy Checkout to receive payments, so that’ll be recurring. So if you need to receive payments for any of your products, there is no better solution. This is my shameless plug for Snappy Checkout, I’m affiliate for. Go ahead, check it out. Go to pelto.co/sc for Snappy Checkout and you can go ahead and check that out. It’s absolutely my favourite way to collect payments.

It integrates with Paypal or Stripe so they can pay credit card or Paypal. Their fees are really low. I was just actually looking at their fees and it’s 2% or $0.50, whichever is lower. So I worked it out – if you have a product over $25, the most you will pay is $0.50. That’s where it becomes $0.50. I sell a product for $300, right? If I went to somewhere like Gumroad, they charge 5%. So, on top of Stripe, which is 2.9%, I’m paying an extra 2.1% if I go with Gumroad. Let’s just call it 2% to make it easy. So on a $300 product, an extra 2% is $6 for me.

If I sell 10 a month, that’s $60 a month. If I sell 100 a year, that’s $600 a year if I go with Gumroad. If I go with Snappy Checkout, then I’m paying $0.50 rather than $6 on that $300 product. So it’s no-brainer that I would use Snappy Checkout. And also, their checkout, I really it because it looks really professional. It looks really trustworthy. And also, they don’t require people’s shipping addresses. Often, you’ve got this checkouts and people need to put in their shipping addresses to buy an electronic product and I think that lowers conversions and so less people checkout.

You can tell, I use it for all of my products. I absolutely love it. Please go and check it out through my affiliate link, I’d really appreciate it. Go to pelt.co/sc for Snappy Checkout and sign up for an account today.

So that’s where I’m at in my business. Not planning on doing Instructions Not Included episodes daily at the moment because I just don’t have enough to keep updated, but I’ll probably keep them going about once a week or just whenever I feel the urge to say something to you guys. So I hope that you are moving your business forward. I hope that you’re learning from my mistakes. And if you want instructions, you know what to do – go and buy some furniture.

Today I realised the business I have been focusing on and try to grow for the last 2 years may not actually be a viable business.

In the last episode, I talked about how I had lost my niche, but it was actually a lot worse than that and my business was in a way worse situation than that. And it’s still kind of is in a really bad situation. That’s what I’m going to be talking about in today’s episode of Instructions Not Included.

How I came to understand that my business wasn’t in fact viable and wasn’t going to help me achieve my goals and then what I’m doing to kind of get myself out of that hole and to convert my business into something that is actually going to help me achieve my goals. Because, obviously, we’re in business, we’re in online marketing for a reason.

We want to generate a certain amount of revenue, a certain amount of income and live a certain type of lifestyle. And so, for me, I guess the ultimate goal for me is to earn about $100,000 in revenue or $75,000 a year in take home profit that I can live off, but then I also have the caveat that I want the majority of that income to be semi-passive income.

So I don’t want to be doing a lot of work in order to generate that income. For example, I could do consulting and work with local businesses.

I could do client work and setup websites for people, but that could generate me and help me achieve the $100,000 a year, but I’ll be working full time in order to achieve that. However, I’ve got stuff like my membership site, like Property Tools, like On Property Plus that requires little upkeep and little maintenance and that’s the sort of income that I want to create.
Alright, so let me take you on the journey that I went on to discover that my business wasn’t viable. And then, let’s talk about the steps we’re taking to turn that around. I think this is going to be a very important episode for me.

It’s a very important episode for a lot of people to actually do this stuff first and understand what you’re doing in your business so you don’t go 2 years like I did before you realise, “Hang on, the path I’m going down probably isn’t actually viable.” Okay, I worked on Sunday because my wife was away on Friday and I took care of the kids. So I took a day off Friday and I worked on Sunday. And what I did on Sunday was that I went through the past history of my membership site, so I’ve got two.

I had On Property Plus where I find positive cash flow properties for people. And then I’ve got Property Tools which is a calculator to help people calculate whether or not a property is going to be positive cash flow. So On Property Plus goes back about 18 months. Property Tools goes back about 5 or 6 months.

So I looked at those and focused mostly on On Property Plus, which I had changed the name to On Property Listings, but it’s going back to On Property Plus, we’ll get to that in a second. Basically, I went through my stats, all the way back for 18 months.

I looked at it and I realised that in the space of 12 months, in terms of monthly members to On Property Plus, I’ve gone backwards. So in the last 12 months where I think my business is growing, traffic on the website is growing, monthly subscribers to my main membership site, my main source of income, have gone backwards by 4 customers. And my income had gone up a little bit by about $270 or $280 or something like that. So imagine, in 12 months, working in your business for 12 months and you grow your income by $280 a month or $3,000 a year, is basically what I was looking at.

So what I realised when I looked back was that in the course of the year, 90% of monthly members left the service. And so, basically, every single year, I’m starting from scratch. Every single month, I’m starting from scratch to get new members and to get revenue coming in.

In terms of the goals that I had, I’m likely to achieve that. We’ll get to that in a sec. I also looked at annual subscribers and this was a little bit better, but only 30% of those stay around when it comes time to renew their membership.

I didn’t have as much data on annual members because, obviously, it takes longer for them to churn. But from what I can see, about 30% of annual members renew their subscription a further year. And so, with this knowledge in hand, I was really realising that even though I have a subscription business, not many people are staying around. And so, I can’t just focus on getting new customers and my business is going to grow as a result of that. Basically, each year, I need to get all brand new customers for my service. So that was the first realisation.

The next thing that I did after having this realisation was I went back to modelling my products. And so, I looked at the income that I wanted to generate and I’m looking at, “Okay, based on different price points, how could I generate this income?” Let me just bring it up on my computer so we can talk through this together and it’ll make a lot of sense to you. I’m just going to log on to my spreadsheet. Basically, what I decided was that for On Property Plus, I wanted it to achieve $60,000 per year.

I figured Property Tools will probably make anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 a year. Then there’s extra affiliate stuff like my affiliate deal with Ben and then extra sites and stuff like that on the side as well. I just thought $60,000 for On Property Plus is the goal that I’m going for.

Let me bring up my modelling page. I was looking at all different price points. So recently, I had raised the price from $300 a year to $480 per year. I was looking at, “Okay, how many sales would I need in order to achieve my goal of $60,000?” remembering that the majority of people are actually leaving every single year. And so, I was looking at my goal of $60,000 and at my previous price point of $300, I would need 17 new subscribers a month to achieve that goal. And when I looked back over my statistics, my best month was 17 in the one month. Most of the months were more like 7, 8, 2, 13.

It went up and down, but my average was about 7 or 7.5 and I needed 17 every single month in order to achieve my goal because people are leaving every year. So I’m looking at this and I’m like, I haven’t had a new annual subscriber in the last 2 months at the current price, which is $480 and I’ve had a few monthly members, but they’re going away every year. So I’ve decided, I really want to focus on annual subscribers.

I think that’s the easiest way to achieve my goal and so I was looking at different price points. At $100, I would need 50 new subscribers per month. At $200, I would need 25; At $300, I would need 17; At $400, I would need 13 and at $500, I would need 10 new subscribers per month. And so, I was looking at this range, I thought, the most achievable is the $200 to $300 range. $100 is too cheap, I need too many. Between $200 and $300 or 17 and 25, is something that I could probably aim for. Really, I was thinking about this and I’m like, “Yeah, I can’t achieve this. This business isn’t going to achieve the goals that I thought it was going to achieve.”

I realised that as my website traffic was growing, the income wasn’t growing with it. And so, I can’t just focus on growing web traffic in order to get more sales. There is one saving grace for me, though. And that’s the fact that looking at my data, about 30% of annual members re-subscribe. This means that my goal of 17 per month can drop down to 12 per month if 30% of people stay. So, 12 per month is more achievable – it’s only 5 off my regular goal. So what I eventually came to and I had a long discussion with my wife. We’re talking through what are we going to do? What should we look at? There was a few conclusions that I came to

. The first was that On Property Plus isn’t going to be the runaway success that I had hoped it would be – that would eventually generate over $100,000 a year by itself. That’s just probably not going to happen. So that was the first big realisation.

So then, we’re just looking at, okay, rather than thinking about this as a recurring product, even though I would still sell it as a yearly subscription or monthly subscription. I really need to look at this as one-time sales moreso. And so, realising that, looking back over the data, I did an experiment for a couple of months – I think about 3 or 4 months this year where I turned off On Property Plus. So it wasn’t available to the public, but what would happen was each week, a new cohort of people – and a cohort is just a small group of people, about 100 people, would go through a sales funnel like Jeff Walker talks about.

So they go through 3 free videos then there’s a 4th video, On Property Plus opens for them for 5 days and then it closes. So a bunch of people go through this every week and when I looked at my data, my biggest month was when I was doing this experiment, that was 17. And also, the majority of those months were quite good and quite high in terms of the subscribers that I got.

I’m just wondering if I can find it and show you guys. When we made this change, which was May in 2015. In terms of new customers, we had 15 one month, 17 one month, 8 one month and 6 one month. But then, before that, we’ve had like 7 one month, we had 16 then we had 2, 2, 3. So on average, it seems to be higher.

What I could tell from the previous experiment that I had done is actually this is probably the best way for me to sell On Property – is to close it down, have this evergreen launch funnel where people only get an opportunity to join for about 5 days and after that, the opportunity closes for them.

I can also supplement this maybe twice a year or something like that where I can open it up to the public and do a bonus offer and things like that. Something that I haven’t done in the past, but something that I would definitely explore moving forward now. So if I look at this and I look at 15, 17, 8 and 6, the goal of at least 12, but hopefully 17 per month is probably achievable.

If instead of focusing on more traffic, I actually focus on conversions. Conversions from my website to my email list and then also conversions from the email list into On Property Plus members. So that was the second big thing.

First big thing was we realised that it’s probably not going to be the money-maker that we thought it was. And then, the second big thing was that the best way to sell this is probably through the evergreen launch funnel. So we need to reactivate that and go through the process of reactivating that. Since last time, I’ve moved from Ontraport, where I was previously hosting this to Convert Kit. And to actually run this evergreen launch funnel was a bit harder in Convert Kit.

I had to word out how to do it and maybe I’ll do a tutorial on that in the future. That’s the point right now. It’s that, okay, it’s not going to be the money maker that we thought it was, but if I launch this evergreen launch funnel, then potentially, we can achieve our goal of $60,000 on this product each year. Instead of focusing on new content and driving more traffic to my blog, I’m instead going to focus on conversions. So converting the email subscribers more, getting more people to sign up for my email list and so forth.

So, yeah, we had a big realisation that the plans that I had weren’t moving us in the direction that we thought that we were going to get. I actually thought my saving grace would be Property Tools, which is $5 a month or $50 per year. And then when I looked at that and I’m looking at average churn for that, they say a churn of 5% is good and churn of 2%. Churn is the percentage of customers leaving each month. So churn of 5% is good. Churn of 2% is world class.

My churn, some months it was below 5%, some months it was over 5%, but basically, I think my churn is going to be around 5% or a little bit higher. For me to even achieve $50,000 per year from Property Tools, I would need 1,000 members and if I had 1,000 members, my churn at 5% would be 50 people a month. So that’s 50 people a month that I would need to replace and I’m getting about 10-15 new customers a month. So to go from 10 to 15 to 50 with Property Tools is probably not achievable.

I always thought, that long-term, Property Tools will be my saving grace and that it would be the best long-term generator of cash, but now that I understand churn, I understand that Property Tools will eventually cap it up and it’s going to be probably be nowhere near that $50,000 year example that we just talked about.

So that’s not going to be our saving grace. On Property Plus wasn’t moving where we wanted it to. So this week, I’m just working on converting On Property Listings back to On Property Plus, providing everything that I did previously in the past so people get access to courses, to calculators, to all that sort of stuff. So it’s back to being a membership site, rather than just an email that gets sent out to people. So I’m all the way back to where I started, which was back in September, a few months ago and I basically got the same strategy.

It was really good to realise this stuff, but also really painful to realise it as well. So I definitely recommend that you go through your stats, and then model forward and say, “Okay, how many units do I actually need to sell to achieve my goals and is that actually achievable?” Because for me, it wasn’t really achievable unless I make some drastic changes. And for me, that’s converting to this evergreen launch funnel. And then also focusing on how to increase my conversions as well.

By doing this, by doing the modelling, by understanding that this business probably isn’t going to be what I thought it was, actually gave me some really good action steps that I can take to improve the chances of me generating an above average income from my business.

Another thing that we decided as well is that On Property is probably never going to be the home run success. And so, for me to generate a full time income online above that $100,000 revenue that we talked about, I’m really going to need to start diversifying into other niches. Dreamy Dad was the start of that with talking about night terrors. But that’s probably not going to be a very big site so I need to explore other things that I can do. At the moment, I don’t have any ideas.

I am thinking about doing some tutorials on how to setup a website, how to sell your own products, that sort of stuff and make some money through affiliate commissions, but I haven’t done the research to understand how competitive is this market. Can I compete in this space? Is it even worth doing? At the moment, I’m not 100% sure. I’m just going to try and get On Property set up so that it’s ticking away. And then, I’ll try and find some other niches and see what I can do.
Big realisations this week. Big, big, big changes in my business. Kind of depressing to realise that what I’ve been working on for the last 2 years probably isn’t going to achieve the goals that I have for myself, but at least now I know and I can move forward and try and find a way to achieve my goals. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, hey? We run our own business, we learn these things and we’re constantly adjusting to try and achieve our goals.

I hope that this encourages you to go and look at your product. Go and look at your business model and to say, well, is this actually going to help me achieve my goals or not? And then see what action you can do to actually move you towards your goals.

I’ll keep you guys updated with how I go moving forward. Different niches I decide to go in, etc. and how my business evolves. I hope this has been interesting. This has been a super important realisation for me. This will be a very important episode for me to look back on and to realise the mistakes that I made and to stay focused on business that will actually move me towards my goal. I hope that encourages you guys.

This episode is sponsored by Snappy Checkout, which is, I think, the best way to collect payments and to deliver your products. To collect payments for your products and I use it on all of my sites. I use it for every product that I sell. It’s got a great backend system to track all your sales and things like that, integrates with Stripe.

It’s really affordable as well. So go to pelt.co/checkout. So pelt.co/checkout to go and have a look at Snappy Checkout today and I definitely think it’s the best way to sell your own products. And I’m working with Mike, the owner there, to actually work on a one-click upgrade. So you sell a product and then they go to an upsell page and then with one click, they can be charged and get access to the upsell. So that’s something that we’re working on together.

Hopefully, we’ll have that together soon and I can start working on some upsells and things as well, which can just add a little bit to my business. So, again, go ahead, check it out. Go to pelt.co/checkout. That’s my affiliate link and it helps support this show and helps support what I think is an absolutely awesome product. So until next time, guys, stay positive.

After feeling like I had no idea how to move forward I have decided to refocus in on my niche of investing in positive cash flow properties.

I think I have worked out the solution to my problem. I am not 100% sure that I have worked out the solution, but at least I’ve got something to go with now. So if you have listened to the last episode or if you haven’t, go back and listen to it.

Basically, I am struggling at the moment because revenue has decreased in my business and I don’t know what I did wrong, and I don’t know what to do. So it has been laying very heavily on my mind as to what exactly I need to do to get myself out of this rut and to transform my business, get my business healthy again and keep it going.

On the bright side, I have spoken to Ben and he was saying that there are some good leads coming through his buyers’ agency. so in terms of cash flow I don’t think I have anything to stress about. But in terms of the longevity of my business that’s what I have been stressing about and I don’t really have a solution.

And then I was just thinking about it and thinking about it, talking to my wife about it, thinking about it some more and I came to the realization that I used to be the positive cash flow guy and everything I would talk about on my site would all be around investing in positive cash flow property. And then the issued that I had was that I had kind of tapped out that market in terms of organic traffic, in terms of search engine traffic and SEO because only so many things you can write about how to find positive cash flow property which is really the problem that I solved.

And so what I then did was I started to create content that was just about general property investing. So, I expanded my niche.

But I think the mistake that I made is that I should have still remain the positive cash flow guy and still focus on that niche but my free content is just more general in nature in order to reach a larger audience. So what I did and the mistake that I think I’ve made is I went from the positive cash flow guy to the property guy.

And being a property guy in a space of thousands of property advisors, buyers, agents, property marketers – all of these sorts of people, I’m just one in a sea of thousands. And so I think the mistake that I made and again I could be wrong on this and I could need to change my mind, but the mistake that I have made is I’ve gotten away from my core message which is investing in positive cash flow property and helping people invest in positive cash flow property.

And so I was thinking about my products. I was thinking about my offerings. And the way that I came upon – I guess, this discovery that I had lost my niche was I was wondering with this problem – Is it a product problem?” “Do my products suck and I need all new products? Is it a pricing problem? So my products are overpriced or under-priced or just not priced correctly? Or is it a marketing problem and I’m not marketing my products correctly? And I do feel like it’s a marketing problem – that I’m not marketing my products correctly.  Because I’ve got a lot of people that signed up for my services and my products and are happy with them.

Therefore, I’m pretty sure that it’s not the products. I’m pretty sure it’s not the pricing. I’m pretty sure that it is nothing. So I’m thinking along this train of thought and then came up with I guess the idea that I’d lost my niche.

As a result, I was rethinking through my products and what I have to offer and how I can position them and I only got back to being the positive cash flow guy or on On Property to be all about finding positive cash flow property. So what I’ll have is On Property listings which I’ll probably might even change the name to Positive Cash Flow Listings just to make it more obvious. I’m not 100% sure about that but I have the listing so that’s a service that I hope you will find real positive cash flow properties.

I’m going to merge my courses into one which I’m going to call Positive Cash Flow Boot Camp. This will be a three-part course. Therefore, the three courses that are selling as individual units will now become one boot camp. And I really feel like when you say boot camp it makes you think about an intensive something that you go through. You can chew on the content quickly. You build up the skills quickly. To me, that’s exactly what a boot camp is. Therefore, to take the three products that I have, packaged them together into positive cash flow boot camp I can show people how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area and also how to evaluate individual properties. So I’m confident with that.

Also, property tools I think I may need to put – not on the back burner but just not a huge focus on my site.  Nevertheless, there are property tools I’ll be marketing as tools to help you invest in positive cash flow properties. So I’ve got all of that same sort of products – a tiny bit of repackaging with the boot camp, but basically the same. I’m just changing the marketing around it and changing my focus back to my original niche which is helping people find positive cash flow properties.

I also wanted to record this episode quickly because I’ve listened to something and I don’t want to forget it. I was listening to The Fizzle Podcast which is great. It’s an awesome bunch of guys over there at Fizzle and they were talking about finding your true voice and there were two things that they’ve talked about in the podcast episodes. It’s episodes one and two of that podcast if you want to go check it out. But two things that they talked about that resonated with me around this topic of finding your voice, finding your niche – all of this sort of stuff. And one thing that really resonated with me that was really cool was when they were talking about choosing the niche or choosing the market that you go into.

Often we talk about passion. We talk about our calling. We talk about all of this sort of stuff and that can just be so overwhelming. I know I’ve been overwhelmed at times thinking about, “Am I passionate enough about this market, about this business to pursue it for the next five or 10 years? Am I passionate  enough? Do I feel like God is calling me to work in this business?” And I have really struggled with that.

But reframing it – they reframed it as, “Is this something you care about?” And by reframing it to building a business around things that I care about just makes it so much easier. Do I care about the property market and helping people invest in property? Absolutely. But then I also care about helping parents with night terrors and I care about a whole bunch of other things and I could add those into my business.

So by changing the language to what we’re passionate about, to what we care about has really inspired me in terms of choosing my niche, feeling comfortable with it. Even though it may not be my biggest passion in the world or my biggest calling in the world, it’s something that I care about, it’s something in an area that I want to have an impact and so that’s important.

And they also talked about finding your own voice and a lot of them have gone through this passage – I guess you would call it, of starting with very generic content or copying someone else that they had seen, some guru in the market or something like that and just not getting a lot of traction. But then, they found their own voice, start putting their personality into things and then things really took off. And they interviewed one of the guys – the guy who started a [inaudible7:28] fitness.

He was saying he was writing five articles a week for nine months and he got no traction or generic articles. And then what he decided to do was to move back to two articles a week but to really inject who he was – really inject his new newness and his passion and family guy references and style was references into his blog post and that’s when things started really taking off for him.

So when it comes to finding my voice, I guess what I want to do is find what is my voice, what makes me different in the property market. Because I’m not just a property guy, as I think if I’m just going to be a property guy then there’re other guys who are better. I therefore need to find my specific angle; my specific voice and I’ll be trying out a whole bunch of things. I’ll be trying out how to podcast. I’ll be trying out high quality videos with more editing. I’ll be trying out longer podcast episodes potentially when I’m doing rants and going on rants and things like that.  What I’m going to do is try a whole bunch of things to see what resonates with me, what resonates with my audience and to try and find, I guess the voice that I want to have in the market.

So I was feeling very stuck. I’m feeling a lot less stuck now. I’m passionate to get back to work tomorrow. I took Friday off so I’m going to be working on Sunday and I’m passionate to get back to redo my homepage to focus on positive cash flow property. I’m also excited too I guess, to redo my products, to put a much larger emphasis on finding and investing in positive cash flow properties and then moving forward into the free content things I’ll be creating.

Then I will be looking to find my voice, trying a few things and I guess, injecting up as much of whom I am into things. And so that may be like so much about these references. That may be my new newness that I have. That may be just me being quirky or whatever. I’m not 100% sure yet but I’ll go ahead and I’ll give it a try.

There were emails that I sent out and I’ll just give you a quick update. I did make four new sales for property tools so I got four new members for that. I think I got three new annual members, one monthly. So that was good. However, that was four emails sent out to like a database of 10,000 people. So it’s definitely not a massive conversion to make $155 on a database of 10,000 people over four emails.

Actually, as I’m recording this I just got a new customer – let’s open this up and see if it’s from property tools. That takes it from four to five. Actually, they have spent $99 so they must have bought a course – “How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties Course.” As I said, I will be selling them individually again so take that $155 up to $255.

All of the way that I receive my payments and stuff, I use a product called Snappy Checkout which I have an affiliate relationship with which you guys can check out. They’re sponsoring this podcast in a way because they are an affiliate deal. They are something that I absolutely love and recommend. I’m looking to do a whole bunch of videos around how to use them and some of the cool things you can do with Snappy check out now that I’ve got this affiliate thing. So that’s another thing that I care about -helping people sell their products and helping people do things well. I think Snappy Checkout is an awesome tool and that’s something that I’ll consider creating some episodes about, some tutorials about.

So you can check out Snappy Checkout – just go to www.pelt.co/checkout  and you can go straight through to see that product. It’s absolutely awesome and will help you sell your products or subscriptions, memberships, all that good sort of stuff. So go ahead www.pelt.co/checkout  and I’ll get a small affiliate commission if you end up using them.

I absolutely appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate you taking the time and letting me vent what I’m feeling and the conclusions that I’ve come to. Hopefully as I get to work this week we’ll start to see some results and we’ll start move things forward.

So until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

I feel stuck and have no idea how to move forward in my business. What should my next move be?

Hey Guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I am feeling stuck in my business here.

Aaagghhh! I definitely feel better than I did the other day when I had rehashed my membership into something that was worse than what it was before. So I am feeling better about that, but I am definitely feeling stuck about scaling my business and getting it to the point where it generates enough revenue to support me. I have had quite a few good months in the past, but the money just seems to have dried up. I am not getting new signups.

I still have some recurring revenue from old signups and that is going to cover my costs, but that is it. So it is not going to make any profit, or generate me any profit to live off or to grow my business off. Definitely I am in a place where I am starting to get concerned and frustrated. I feel like I am in an impasse where I just do not know how to move my business forward. I do not know if the products that I have are the right products.

I do not know if the way I am positioning them is correct. Maybe I just need to change the way I am positioning them, change the way that I do my marketing because I am getting more traffic than ever before to my site OnProperty.com.au. I am getting 2,000 people a day, coming to that site which is quite a lot for the Australian property space. And I just cannot seem to convert that traffic into revenue for my business. And so I am very frustrated at the moment. I do not know whether to just push forward to continue marketing the products that I have.

I do not know whether I need to change the pricing or change the positioning or if I need to go in a new direction all together and create new products. I am just feeling very stuck and I cannot work out in my mind what to do to move forward and to get out of this.

I am passionate about it; it is not that I am in a rut and am sick of On Property. I am keen to invest in On Property. I am keen to make it something awesome. But I kind of feel like I have lost that original vision of just trying to help people find and invest in positive cash flow property. It has kind of become this Frankenstein monster where it is a whole bunch of things and tools and courses and a whole bunch of videos that have nothing to do with positive cash flow property.

I just feel like I have lost my way, and I just do not know what I am doing. I do not know if I am at the point where maybe On Property, because I am not willing to compromise on my ethics and sell developments, maybe I am at the point where I need to realize that On Property is not going to be a full time gig for me. It is not going to be a one-site that creates a full time income, and I need to explore other revenue-generating avenues as well.

I have my site DreamyDad.com, which I have created. But that is probably not going to do anything for at least 6 months. I am really spewing that I got rid of Inspiring Audio Books and I got rid of Tired and Sleepy, because at least they were combined making a hundred dollars a month. And if I was at this point right now where I am struggling with On Property, I could work on those and try and scale those. But I am at the point now where really, anything that I want to create, I need to create from scratch because the public speaking site is not making any money and I do not think will be in the future.

I am making some ad revenue on that now, so probably a hundred dollars a month or something in ad revenue. And then the podcasting site that makes a bit of money, but I do not know how I want to scale that. And so I am just stuck and I am frustrated. And I do not know what to do next so I do not know.

I am just working an hour this morning, had to set a couple of things up but then I have date day with my wife. And then I am mentoring at a high school this afternoon, so I will not be doing much work today. And then tomorrow my wife is flying down to Sydney because her sister is opening a new business, so she is going down to help her with that. So I will be on dad duty Friday to Saturday, and then I am probably going to work on Sunday because I have lost a day on Friday.

So at least I have a couple of days where I have an excuse to not work and i can think about my business and I can think about where I want to take it. I have set up like an email mini-course that I am sending out over the next 4 to 7 days to people.

It is actually part of one of my courses, but the benefit is that it kind of suddenly markets my course on how to find positive cash flow properties. But I also use Property Tools inside of that quite heavily and so it markets Property Tools. And really, what I want to find out by sending this out to my list is can I create videos that use Property Tools, will that result in people signing up and using Property Tools.

That is what I want to find out because if I can find out that yes, that is the case. If I create free videos that I can give away where I use Property Tools, and if people will sign up for it because they have seen these free videos, well then I really have a marketing strategy that I can move towards and I can just look at what videos can I create where I use my product, and then I can focus on that.

Or I am even thinking, I am even at a point now, should I turn on Property Listings back to Evergreen? Should I change the pricing back to $30 a month? But should I change it to the Evergreen Launch Funnel where people go through this launch funnel and then it opens for 5 days for them and then it closes. So I am actually thinking of going back to that because at least the revenue for that was a bit more consistent than what I am getting for the moment, which is basically no sales at the moment.

Sales for Property Tools have dropped off. Sales for On Property Listings have dropped off. I was doing really well and I had my best revenue month ever, just like a month and a half ago. And now, I am feeling stuck and that is the process of a startup. And so I do not know how I want to get out of this. I do not know how I am going to do it.

I am really feeling stuck and frustrated. But I did want to document this to you guys and to me in the future to go back and to realize that this is hard, that I need to think my way out of this problem, and i really do not know what to do and I am hoping that I get some sort of spark of genius. I get some sort of idea that can help me, but at the moment I am really stuck.

And so, if you are religious, please pray for me to help give me ideas and to help give me a way forward; or shoot me an email, Ryan@RyanMclean.net and encourage me or share some ideas with me about things that you think I could be doing better because I need your help.

I cannot do this by myself and I think I am realizing that more and more. I really need the input of my wife, and also I need the input of other people and you guys. And I am just trying to work this out and I do not know what to do. Do I push forward? Do I change my pricing? Do I change my marketing strategy? Do I go to a new niche altogether?

If you have any ideas, please email me Ryan@RyanMclean.net. I am going to sign off now. I am just going to go and try and think of something to do. I do not know. If I get an idea, I will let you guys know.

Until next time, if you want instructions turn and listen to me because I have no idea what I am doing. Go and buy some furniture.

Maybe I hit the reset button a little too quickly. I made an idiotic decision that I had to immediately undo.

Oh my! I am such an idiot! My goodness!

Hey! This is Ryan from Instructions Not Included and I made a big mistake in my business. I was just silly. Last night when we were going to bed, my wife and I, I decided to ask her a bunch of questions because I felt stuck in my business and I felt like the idea that I had to merge all the courses into Property Tools to create this shopping center of property stuff was just a bad long-term plan.

I just had this feeling in my mind; bad brand name, bad idea, and talking to her I realized how bad of an idea it actually is.

Think about this right, the way that I was thinking, the courses that I created were not selling that well. So my idea was, how am I going to take the stuff on my site that is not selling that well, that people are not that interested in, and I make that that focus and I make those courses the focus of my entire product or big product.

Is it not that just ridiculous? If people are not interested in the courses, why would I put more focus on them? Really, I should be defocusing them and focus on the things that people actually care about, and the things that people are actually signing up for. And so I have been an idiot and I made a big mistake in that I created this, I sent out emails to existing members to say, “Here is what I am doing. You are getting a free upgrade.

Here is why it is going to be awesome. You are going to get access to all the courses that I have released.” And now I have realized my focus on courses – which is wrong to start with, that I should be focusing on other things.

So after talking to my wife about it last night, doing a big brainstorming session that went for well over an hour, we decided that my focus should not be on pushing more and more courses and marketing them. Sure, I should put out the courses that I have already created and the one that I promised which is the Property Evaluation Course – I promised that and it will be useful so I will go ahead and create it; and then just leave the courses there.

If they sell, they will sell; if they do not, they do not. Do not make them the big focus of your business, moving forward.

Another thing that I was stressed about was, my whole goal is 3 to 5 years’ time to have a pretty passive income online and have the freedom to explore and travel, potentially home-school my children, to do a whole bunch of things that we are potentially thinking about doing. And so if I am going to then create this website that needs new courses added to it all the time, and also I added a community aspect to it, a Facebook group.

That is a lot of upkeep and that is a lot of work and that is not going to create the business to free me up to do what I want to do. So I really need to think, not necessarily what is the best way to create recurring monthly revenue, what is the best way to make the most money from my site; but what is the best way to get to where I want to be in the next 3 to 5 years. And the plan that I set out, that I mentioned in the last episode, is definitely seems to not be the right plan. So what I have done – luckily I did not send out an email to my entire list so I do not need to backtrack on that. And so what I have done is I have just converted everything back, converted the sales page back.

And then inside my membership site I have added a new sort-of user role and that is like a tools user role. And so the people who I already promised to get access to courses and who I promised to get a free upgrade, they will still see all that stuff on the site. But then I have created this new user role called tools, so anyone who signs up now will just be a tools’ member and will only see the calculator.

They will not even know that the courses exist. They will not show up for them. It is not in the sales or marketing message at all. And I also did not create any free content around it. So I am glad that at least not too much damage was done.

So a couple of ideas that came out of our brainstorming session last night: the first idea was that listings generate the most of my revenue and obviously there is this thing in Australian property where people do not want to do a lot of things themselves. They want someone else to do it for them or they want it provided to them. And so we are kind of running off that idea and that thesis about the property market is that the stuff that I put out that people wanted done for them. People seem to gravitate towards that, stuff that are really easy like the listings, like the tools, and the stuff that works like you need to learn how to do this yourself and it is something that you are going to do yourself, does not sell as well. So I am thinking Property Listings, bulk of the revenue, how can we expand that?

We went through a whole bunch of different things. We looked at potentially expanding into reports that we could provide people on the suburb or on the property, and how much we could sell that for. But then, we came back to the fact that that is a lot of increase work. There is a lot of fact-checking that I need to do. There is a lot of human error because we go out and get those reports ourselves. So that probably was not going to be the most viable option for us. It was a good idea and I think it would create revenue but it is not going to lead to the life that we want in that 3 to 5 years’ time.

So the next thing that we thought about is something that I have been thinking about for a while, which is selling access to the archives of On Property, which over 500 high rental yield property listings now, so people can go back and they can see where these properties used to be listed, what areas they could potentially be looking in, and so it just expands people’s minds there. So we are considering doing that as an upsell and so we decided on that. And basically today, I just fixed Property Tools, put it back to normal. And then I am working on creating that upsell for the archives there.

Another thing that kind of inspired that was I was listening to a video by a guy that I would not recommend because he does not seem very ethical, but they were talking about some sales and strategies and even though a lot of their stuff is really sleazy, one of the ideas that came out of that was that when people are buying something they often want an upsell. And so there are upsells that you can offer them so that is what I think I am going to do there.

And then with the tools, we decided to reinvest in that, reinvest in the design of the calculator to make it easier to use and to make it look more professional. And also we had an idea for a tool that we could create for people doing suburb research. So I am going to think about that and explore that more.

So I guess the idea to roll all my courses into one big university fort of thing has fallen flat. And the idea now is to focus on tools and services which is my listings, which is my calculator. And then basically, the eventual goal is to be able to give all my content away for free, but within that content I am using my tools; within that content, I am using my calculator and that sort of stuff. So the free content encourages people to buy the paid tools because it makes doing the research for them a lot easier.

So that is, I guess, the end goal that we are working towards at the moment. So I feel like an idiot because I went down the wrong path, but luckily not too much damage is done. And I am now back, back to where I was but with a more clearly defined path of how we are going to move forward.

So hopefully this just encourages you that often in business, especially in startups, you are not going to get the product right first go. There is going to be a lot of innovating around the product and changing the product but I do not hear many people talking about innovating around the product in a way that you absolutely destroy it and go down the path that you do not want to go and then having to backtrack from that, which is exactly what I have had to do. So be encouraged by that.

If you end up down that path where you have created a product and you have to backtrack, do not be too alarmed and just find a way to make it happen. And tomorrow I am not working. I have a date day in the morning with my wife, which we do every Thursday morning. And then I am actually mentoring at my child’s school; there is an entrepreneur class or this program that is going into the school and help teaching young kids the concepts of running a startup and many valuable product and all that sort of stuff, so they are looking for mentors.

So I put up my hands up that after date day I am going to try and mentor and help a bunch of high school kids as well. That should be fun and I will let you guys know how that goes, what I got out of it, and I feel like whenever you give something, you always get something back in terms of ideas. So hopefully by giving my time to these kids, by hanging out with them, hopefully I can get some clarity as well and some things that I could do in my business and jump start some ideas of things that I could potentially be doing.

So that is where I am at. Hope your business is moving forward, and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

When running your own business you often need to change strategies all the time. You need to never be afraid to hit the reset button.

Sometimes in business and in life you just get an intuitive sense of things, and I have often found that if I acted on those intuitions, acted on that feeling, then most of the time good things will come about. Occasionally, you would believe something or believe that you have felt something and you would realize to discover that it was not true. But the majority of the time, you get a sense of something without fully understanding the entire picture, and that is what happened to me today.

I understand the importance of sending out email broadcast to my list. It is not something that I remember to do on a regular basis. I am trying to do it consistently on Wednesdays, but today is Friday and I had not done one yet. I was listening to a podcast or something and they were talking about email marketing and I am like, “I have a list of 10,000 people. I need to send something out to them. I need to communicate with them, and I need to market my product – my suburb research course.”

I am in the fortunate position now that I have been paid by Ben and I am not in a cash-strap position, and so I do not need to send a thousand-dollar worth of this course within the next week in order to survive or to not have to pull from savings. So I am in that good position, so I decided – I wrote an article, I did an episode about what really drives capital growth or the appreciation in price of a property.

And so I just created an email broadcast about that with the marketing message at the in saying, “If you want to learn how to find areas that are likely to grow, and then check out my course.” And also, if they actually went to the article or went to the episode and watched it, then there is a call to action in that as well. And I sent it out and you know, fairly decent response in terms of opens and click-throughs and stuff like that. But how many sales? Zero.

I got a sale for the suburb research yesterday I think that kind of came out of the blue that may have come from one of my episodes. But all in all, not many sales for this course and I sent out this email, and within a couple of hours I had this intuitive sense that this course is not going to do as well as I have thought. This is not something that I can just market to my list and they will automatically buy. And this is something that is very specific to their situation. And then I have an idea.

I had an idea to reach more customers with my courses because I feel like these courses focused on a particular aspect or particular skill of investing in property, and by keeping them single courses I am only appealing to people who are looking for them right then and there. So if for example the suburb research course, I am only appealing to people who want to go ahead and do suburb research immediately because they are looking at buying a property right now.

So the people who are researching and looking to buy a property right now, that is going to be a small segment of my population, of my user base. So you have property owners, people who have invested in a lot of property, who feel like they know how to research suburbs, they do not want to pay a hundred dollars for a course. And then you have people who are not quite ready to buy yet so they do not feel like it is worth signing up yet. So really, it is just not appealing to enough people and so I had this idea and I realized I was not going to sell this course as much as I thought.

So I decided to do some data diving, which is looking into the data and traffic for my website to begin to understand why are people coming to my website; what do I need to create to sell to people who are then going to buy this suburb research course.

I discovered that a large percentage of my audience were coming to my website looking at things around building a property; and something that I learned through a video series with Ben, who is my buyer’s agent, and we talked about the ins and outs of building a new property. At the end of the course, there was a call to action to getting contact with him and organize a strategy session. And for all the people who went through that course, we discovered that not many people were actually ready to buy, ready to take action, ready to invest; that a lot of these people were actually just in the research phase of their journey and just researching about building a property. They were not necessarily ready to buy one. So this means there is a lot of traffic coming for this particular term, but there is not a lot of money actually being spent by these people, so it is a very small portion of the audience that actually wants to go ahead and buy property.

So I was thinking, “Okay. We have this audience, a large audience that is researching this topic. I know there is not a lot of good information out there because I have written some of it and I have also done the series with Ben. I just know my space, so I know there is not a lot of information out there. So I was like, “Maybe I could take what I did with Ben and create an eBook out of the key aspects of what we talked about and what I learned: so the ins and outs, the most important things to know when building a property.” And so I was like, “Okay. Yeah.” Create an eBook. I could sell this for maybe $9.95 to these people, and I have thousands of people coming each month around this topic. And so I thought $9.95, this is a great thing that I could market.

I could probably sell a couple of these a week. I was not really thinking about how many I would sell, how much I would make for a year, but I was like, this could be something. And I was thinking about what would I include in this eBook, and I wrote down an outline and I was like, I could create a mini-video course, not as high production as I usually do, but that would actually create the content that would then get transcribed, which I could turn into an eBook.

That would be the fastest and the easiest way for me to do that. And so then I am going down this avenue and I am thinking I will sell this eBook with a free course attached to it because that is a value-add. The course will be available for free anyway, but I will package it up and say, “You get the eBook and you get a free course.” And then for some reason – I cannot actually remember the exact moment, but I had the idea in my mind that this course is an extra course that I want to create. All of a sudden I am starting to get quite a lot of courses! I have How to Find Positive Cash Flow Properties.

I have the Suburb Research Course. I am about to create a Property Evaluation Course. I will then have this course and I was thinking, what other courses could I do? There is one on Saving a Deposit, which I get a lot of traffic from, and there is a bunch of other courses that I have thought of; mini courses like How to Increase the Cash Flow of Your Property, How to Do Renovations. There are just so many things that I could create courses on.

And so this is how my thinking is going, how my thought pattern is progressing. And then I am like, this could be a really good membership site in the way that James Schramko talks about it, which is a membership site is kind of like a supermarket. You go to the supermarket and you are never going to buy everything in a supermarket in one visit. However, you know everything that you need is at that supermarket and you often go back to that supermarket over and over again to get the things you need as you need them.

And so in the same way you can create a membership site that is a buffet, that is like Netflix, that has all of these potential things that you could want and you can then just go in as a customer and you can just access the things that you need. And I was thinking about this and thinking about the courses that I wanted to create and I am like, this would be awesome to get people over the barrier, who do not need a course in their specific situation right now. So I am thinking, people who do not need to do suburb research right now might not buy the Suburb Research Course but they might buy access to a membership site that has a whole bunch of courses in it including Suburb Research.

So Suburb research adds to the value of that membership site but they are not buying it for that specific situation. But then you also have people who want specifically to learn about how to do suburb research, I can say. “Look, this course is available inside this membership site. You just sign up and you get access to the course that you want.” So it kind of reaches out to people who do not necessarily want that exact course right now. And then also, it serves the purpose and the need of the people who want to get access to that course and want to solve that problem. So that is a massive plus.

And then I have also been thinking about the thousand true fans theory, which you guys may have heard of. If you have not, simply google thousand true fans, and this is the idea that an artist, that a creator does not need a massive global following in order to generate a decent income. If they have a thousand true fans, and these are the people that would come to every one of their shows, buy every one of their albums or artworks or whatever it may be. If someone had a thousand true fans that they could get to spend $100 a year with them, that would be $100,000 a year, and that would be a decent income. It is not a a multi-million dollar business but it is a decent income for a lot of people.

And so I have really been inspired by these thousand true fans, and my passion really does lie around providing high quality, low value products to the market. I get off being generous. I get off on pricing my products low. I get off on people saying, “Why are you charging so little for your products?” And I get off on just shocking the market because I can and because of who I am as a person, that I can give generously and I can do it because I do not need the money. And so in an ideal world for me, I would offer everything that I offer in On Property, the listings, the tools, all of that sort of stuff.

In a perfect world, I would love to offer everything for just $10 per month, and to have a thousand true fans and $100,000 and bygones be bygones, and then that would be it for me. I do not have the ability to do that at the moment because of the revenue needs of my business as well as the revenue needs of my family. But definitely if my site scaled to a point where I could do that that would definitely be something that I would want to do.

But then I thought, “Hey, if I tack this course onto Property Tools, which is my Property Calculator, where people are already paying $5 a month; and I have about 75 members that I have built over the last 3 or 4 months in there. If I added the courses onto this, change of pricing from $5 a month to $10 a month, then that is the exact amount that I would need to work towards that thousand true fans. And so that is exactly what I did. Today, I changed my sales page. I changed my pricing, and I set up the membership site to also contain these courses. And I launched the new version of Property Tools.

I did not tell anyone about it. I updated my homepage; just put an announcement on my homepage announcing the new version of Property Tools where you get access to all of these. And I am happy to announce that I launched it, as I am recording this – it is 8:30 PM; it probably went live about 4:00 PM. I have made my first sale within a couple of hours. My first $9.99 per month from one of my one thousand true fans has come through.

That was super exciting to see, super exciting to get that feedback and to get that instantaneous customer. And also, I just feel like I am passionate about this. I feel like this is really valuable. I feel like I know what I am offering is awesome, and as I build this up and as I build up more and more courses, really, you do become like the Netflix of the property industry. That would be something that could be really, really exciting. Netflix in Australia, I would not go with anyone else because Netflix just has such a wide variety of things. They have awesome documentaries. They have awesome Netflix show.

There is no point going with anyone else. I think if I can build up this repertoire of property information at such an affordable price, eventually people would be subscribed and they would be, “Why will I go anywhere else when I have access to all these information from Ryan at On Property and all the courses in there for $10 a month. Why would I pay $2,000 to do a course? Why would I go somewhere else when I can stick here?”

So within the space of a day, or a couple of hours, I went from trying to promote a course to completely changing the pricing model and the way that I am selling my products. And really, it is a move back to what I previously had in On Property where everything was bundled in there, which is a bit strange because I just moved away from that a couple of months ago and unbundled everything. And now I am bundling it all back together again. The listings are still separate but everything else – the teachings and the tools, are now bundled together.

So maybe in the future I will unbundle them again, once I add more and more courses, and if the community grows, then I could unbundle the tools again. But at the moment it is good to have the tools bundled in there because it is just  a better excuse for people to stay subscribed for $10 a month because that is the only way they could get access to that calculator. They cannot just go in, download all the content, and then leave because then they will not be able to use the calculator. So by having the calculator in there is encouraging people to stay and as I have said, like eventually if I get enough courses in there and it is Netflix where there is this buffet of content available, then maybe I can unbundle it again in the future.

But that is where I am at now, I am very excited, hoping to drive this forward. I am glad I do not need revenue straight away, and so I can work towards getting more and more customers at this $10 a month price range and work towards eventually getting a thousand true fans and a thousand customers at $10 per month and make about $100,000 a year. I will be very, very happy with that. I could go on and live my life and would not have to worry about things. So that is where I am at.

I hope things are moving forward in your business. One of the things me and my wife always say to each other is to never be afraid to hit the reset button; and in a way that is what I have done today. So I just want to encourage you, no matter how far you have gotten down a path in terms of your pricing strategy or the products that you are creating, never be afraid to hit the reset button, or to backtrack, or to change strategy. So I wish you the best of luck in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

An update on the progress of my new niche site. Good news is that I have finished all the work for it in just 3 days.
 
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included, and I want to give you guys an update on how I am going on the niche site or the small site that I am creating to market the Lully, which is the product that helps stop night terrors in children. My child had night terrors and this product helped him to stop having night terrors during the night.
 
If you do not know what night terrors are, consider yourself lucky; but basically that is when your child wakes up kicking and screaming and having a tantrum but they are not actually awake. So it is very stressful as a parent because you cannot console your child. It is very difficult to wake them up and to make them stop having these night terrors.
 
So I was really excited to find this product which solved my problem. And I was also quite frustrated with the product that it was such a hard solution to find out there.
 
If you are a parent and you have a child with this problem, then it is very hard to find out about this product and I locked into it because I was listening to this week in StartUps and eventually Capital Fund who was talking about how they funded this startup and so I had to do a lot of googling to find them and I found them through like a sleep study blog post on Stanford website about the Stanford Sleep Study or something like that. So it is very hard to find, so I want to help the parents out there who have children who have night terrors.
 
I want to share this with them to help them, but also there is the opportunity for me to market this product through Amazon, because it is available on Amazon.com. I thought I could create a website; I could market this product and I could send them through my Amazon affiliate link, and if anyone buys then I get a commission for that.
 
So that is kind of the basis for my website. I set the goal to creating about 10 articles and spending no more than a week on this site, was what I gave myself. And I am happy to let you guys know that I have created 13 videos, which will turn to articles, and I have only spent 3 days on this site. So today is the third day that I am spending on the site and basically everything is being done now.
 
I have just finished the videos and I am just uploading the videos. And then I just need to write a couple of descriptions and then I am done and I will hand it over to my awesome virtual assistant who will then go ahead and will upload all those to YouTube, will upload the podcast to Soundcloud and will order those transcriptions. And so really, I am done at the moment in terms of what I need to do for the site.
 
I will probably need to revisit it in a couple of weeks when I can actually get those transcriptions done. My transcribers combined can do about 2 hours of audio transcriptions per week, but they are currently working on stuff for On Property. So they will be finished with that in about a week or so, and then I can provide them with the Dreamy Dad ones.
 
In case you did not know, the site is called DreamyDad.com. So I will provide them with those transcriptions, that will take another week for them to deliver those; and my virtual assistant will then receive those and will upload those both to YouTube and to the website, so in a couple of weeks we should have the transcriptions done. We should have them up on the website, and then we are hoping to start to achieve some things, start to get some traffic and maybe get some sales. I am not hoping for a lot. This is really, I guess, a trial for me. But if I could get any sales through this, that would be pretty cool.
 
So at the moment, I think we have uploaded 7 videos of the 13 because I am still processing some of them. But let us go ahead and have a look and let us just use the term night terrors. I am searching in YouTube to try and find myself. I uploaded these videos probably about 24 hours ago now, and I am now on the second page and still have not found myself; third page, okay. So it looks like I am definitely not ranking for night terrors at the moment, but that is a pretty highly searched term so I am definitely not expecting to rank for that in the early days, maybe down the track if my videos do prove popular.
 
One of them was symptoms of night terrors. Let us search for that and see if we come up. Alright, so I am not on the first page, scroll down, not on there at all. So basically, I am not appearing in YouTube at the moment and I am not surprised by this. I am used to putting video up in YouTube for On Property, and if it is for an obscure term it is going to rank for that basically, instantly, for On Property. But I do have a couple of years history with that site, and YouTube knows that people watch my videos and that people like my videos and stuff like that. I am not completely surprised that my videos are not showing up. Let us try this one: how to deal with night terrors.
 
Let us have a search for that. Okay, if we search how to deal with night terrors in YouTube, I am actually the 6th result at the moment. And we have not created any thumbnails for these yet. Well, I have created them but they have not been uploaded.  I am actually the 6th and the 8th results on that page, so that is good. And we also have some thumbnails to upload which will make the videos more likely for people to click on. So nothing really happening in YouTube at the moment, but it has only been 12 hours so I will report back to you guys in the future.
 
But basically, I am super excited to get this done, super excited to work on something that is different from On Property. And it is also just good to get in the creative space of doing something new and then thinking about how can I take that across and apply that to my main site which is On Property. And so I have been thinking, I have been mulling over the last days about potentially doing more high-quality content in the future. So rather than just a talking head video, I am actually thinking about doing some higher production stuff here and there to really engage the audience and to have awesome videos. But that is not something I am going to launch any time soon, but it is something that I am thinking about.
 
And I did really enjoy creating this site for the Lully, creating DreamyDad.com, and I like the process of creating this mini-site to solve a real need out there where people need help and to recommend a product that I absolutely love myself. So definitely I will be thinking through things and how can I replicate this across another website. At the moment I have no ideas.
 
And then the other thing that I am quite passionate about is Super Smash Brothers Melee, but there are a lot of issues about copyright and stuff like that if you are going to be uploading footage of the game. And Nintendo does not seem to be very happy to work with players and creators so I am probably going to stay away from that market.
 
But so I am going to monitor my life and see what other problems that people might want solved on the internet, is there a product that I can recommend, or even if I just create videos and make some money through advertising on smaller sites, that is definitely something that I want to pursue and want to consider because my goal was always to be a media company, not to be a property company. And so for me to be working on this night terror website, I know it feels like I am doing what I wanted to do, which is creating content, creating media and then hopefully making money through that. We will see how we go with this, if it does well, if we start selling some products then I will expand it and do more videos.
 
And I will also consider talking about sleep in general and also I will probably go back to the founders of Lully and see if we can get another interview with them to cover topics in more detail and call on their expertise. But whether we see any traction before I go down that path and make the effort because I can see I am getting traction, I am selling their product then I can say, “Hey guys! I am selling x amount of your product per month. I really need your help in doing a video,” and they are probably more likely to do it.
 
So I am excited about this website, DreamyDad.com. If you want to go ahead and check it out, it is a small niche and I am not even sure if I am going to make any money, but hopefully I can help those parents out there who have night terrors.  So we will see how it goes. That is my update, so 3 days of work. Let us track it and see how much money are we going to make from this website. Was it worth the 3 days of work or should I have just spent those 3 days creating videos for On Property or working on other things.

But it definitely made me think again about Outspoken.co as well as PodcastFast, and particularly about not pursuing those sites and not pursuing creating my own products because it is just so much effort. And rather than pursuing those, to try and find other areas where I can create content and market a product and make money in easier ways. So I do not know. I will be mulling over it.  I will keep you guys updated as thing go. But that is it for me for today.
 
So until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
 
At the end here, I just want to quickly mention the sponsor of the Instructions Not Included Podcast, which is Snappy Checkout. Now Snappy Checkout is the tool that I use to collect credit payments online, or credit cards online. It helps you manage all your products. It can help you deliver your products as well and provides a really seamless checkout experience for customers, both on mobile devices and on their computers. So it is absolutely awesome! It connects with Stripe, which is a very popular payment platform or back end system. And the fees are super affordable. I think it is something like you pay 30 cents or 2%, whichever is less per transaction.
 
For a lot of places like Gumroad, you pay a 5% transaction, so on a thousand-dollar product that is $50. With Snappy Checkout, you pay a Stripe fee which is 2.9% plus whatever fee – $2 or whatever percent it is, whatever is less. So if I went with Gumroad and sold a thousand-dollar product, I will be paying $50. If I use the Stripe with Snappy Checkout, then I end up paying – I think, it is around $31. So it is a big difference. It is a big saving and it is a really awesome tool to manage things on the back end and also provide you with a lot of analytics of how many products you are selling and shows you your monthly stats. So I track all of my sales through that and it is really useful. Great customer support as well, I highly recommend it. If you want to check it out, go to pelt.com, P-E-L-T.co/checkout.
 
That is my affiliate link for Snappy Checkout and thanks to them for providing me with that affiliate link so that they can be a sponsor of this podcast and hopefully drive some revenue for this podcast so we can keep it going and potentially increase the production value of this podcast. If it starts making money then I will spend more time investing in it and maybe even try and get some people to help me with it just to increase the production value of this site. So thanks again Snappy Checkout! Go to pelt.co, P-E-L-T.co/checkout to look at Snappy Checkout and sign up to day.